JLCNY In the News

Divergent messages converge

Scott kurkoski, legal counsel for the Joint Landowners Coalition addresses those gathered for a press conference at the Legislative Office Building on Thursday, June 14, 2012 in Albany, NY. Members of the Joint Landowners Coalition held a press conference to highlight the areas in the southern area of the state that have shown support for natural gas drilling. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

ALBANY — A day after the state Capitol digested the possibility that the controversial natural gas drilling technique known as hydrofracking might be allowed in five counties along the Pennsylvania border, advocates on both sides of the debate came to Albany to share their responses.

Their divergent messages suggested that Wednesday's New York Times report — based on multiple anonymous sources, including a senior official at the state Department of Environmental Conservation — had failed to move either side from their convictions that hydrofracking would bring the state either a safe economic boom or likely environmental disaster.

Thursday began with noncommittal answers from Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a radio interview with Fred Dicker on WGDJ AM. Asked if the Times' story was accurate, the governor gave an elaborate but inconclusive response, suggesting that journalists were getting ahead of the next step in the hydrofracking process: the release of the DEC's final set of regulations.

"We've made no decision with hydrofracking," Cuomo said. " ... DEC has to analyze the science, and they haven't finished analyzing the science."

At noon, members of the environmental group Frack Action led about 30 activists in a demonstration outside the governor's office. (Cuomo was not in town.) While the event followed a familiar script — statements followed by a march with chants, then a handoff of materials to a gubernatorial press aide — it featured the use of a new phrase, "sacrifice zone," to describe regions in which fracking might be allowed.

An hour later in a small pressroom beneath the nearby Legislative Office Building, the pro-fracking Joint Landowners Coalition of New York introduced five town supervisors — many from Broome County, one of the regions cited in the Times report — whose communities have approved resolutions expressing support for hydrofracking within their borders.

The local leaders expressed hope that expanded gas drilling would save hard-pressed rural areas. "We're losing it," said Sandy Rogers of her Steuben County community, the Town of Bradford. " ... Gas well drilling is the way for us to go."

"The core of the Marcellus (Shale) region overwhelmingly supports natural gas development," said Scott Kurkoski, a Binghamton-area attorney who serves as counsel to the JLC.

Kurkoski was less definitive when asked if the JLC agreed with the idea, floated in Wednesday's report, that fracking would only proceed if a community votes to approve it. The lawyer answered by praising the deliberate pace of the DEC's regulatory process and expressing worry that if anyone other than the DEC oversees where hydrofracking might take place, individual landowners' rights could fall victim to the "fear" spread by opponents.

Meanwhile, the door to the pressroom was closed as several of the anti-frackers began to gather in the corridor outside. They waited until the news conference was over before chanting "JLC, don't speak for me!" and "Don't make our home a sacrifice zone!"

The JLC members filed past the protesters and headed to the Capitol's War Room — where the opponents had gathered earlier — before meeting with a member of the Cuomo administration.

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